China’s internet giants, including Baidu (HKG: 9888), ByteDance, Tencent (HKG: 0700), and Alibaba (HKG: 9988), are aggressively purchasing Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) chips valued at $5 billion to build generative artificial intelligence systems. This rush is fueled by concerns that the US might impose new export controls.
A Bloomberg report says Zhang Yiming, the AI genius who built ByteDance into a global behemoth via apps such as TikTok, is already flexing his muscles for the next battle. Not content with queering the pitch for media rivals such as Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), Zhang this time has e-commerce, and Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), in his sights.
The Chinese ride-hailing megacorp, DiDi Chuxing, has agreed to collaborate with the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) on the DCEP – the CBDC under development by China. According to another report, Meituan, the major eCommerce service platform with over 240 million consumers and five million local merchants, as well as video-sharing site Bilibilibili, has begun to cooperate with banks developing the digital yuan.
The Wolf of Bitcoin posted the bitcoin video on TikTok.
The TikTok video zooms in through a door with says, “this is why GPU prices went up,” and then pans across a room filled with power cables and computers. It appears to be a cryptocurrency mining location. Catchy, foot-tapping music plays in the background of the video, which has hashtags like bitcoin, explainbitcoin, bitcoin mining, and minecraft.